1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to database systems, and in particular, to data-temperature-based compression of database data.
2. Related Art
A database is a collection of stored data that is logically related and that is accessible by one or more users or applications. A popular type of database is the relational database management system (RDBMS), which includes relational tables, also referred to as relations, made up of rows and columns (also referred to as tuples and attributes). Each row represents an occurrence of an entity defined by a table, with an entity being a person, place, thing, or other object about which the table contains information.
Storage devices used for database data storage are growing in capacity and decreasing in price thereby offering an ever decreasing cost per gigabyte (GB). Despite this, customer demand for even greater storage capacity at an even lesser price is driving adoption of wholesale compression of tables in order to provide for this need. Current forms of compression typically implement wholesale compression of an entire database table that require substantial amounts of central processing unit cost that is added to any query that accesses these compressed tables. Also, the database administrators must maintain a list of all of the database tables which might want to be compressed and/or uncompressed and manually cause this to happen at the appropriate points in the lifetime of the table.